No Escape From Reality
by MollyCarpenter
Summary: Can you call it RPF when there are demons?


From the LiveJournal of prentice_molly, August 2009

**Meta, RPF, and Why I'm Conflicted**

So hi guys. This is...not what I expected to be posting tonight. I'm specifically tagging** Iknowaghost**, **trickfic**, and **princess_aurora**-don't need to tag **misty-chan**, because she was on IM with me last night while I was busy freaking out.

Some of you probably know that my SPN collection was incomplete. I was missing_ Children Shouldn't Play..., The Usual Suspects, Houses of the Holy, Heart, Red Sky_..., and_ Jus in Bello_. Usually I'm a stickler for reading/watching things in order, but with SPN I couldn't help myself, plus by the time I got into the fandom a bunch of the earlier books were getting hard to find. I had all of the first arc (through John's death) because of a lucky find at a used book store; the second arc, however, was harder to track down, and someone bought the single copies of_ RSaM _and _JIB _out from under me at the comic shop.

Thus you can imagine the squee two weeks ago when I opened an unexpected box that showed up just in time for my birthday and all my missing books were inside, courtesy of a RL friend with too much money and very good book-search skills. Now, these days I am a Responsible Adult (tm), so I wasn't blowing through them the way I would have when I was in college, but two nights ago I started _JIB_. I was really looking forward to it, because I liked the Henriksen arc and I knew _JIB_ was his send-off.

This is where we have a digression.

I come from a big family. Really big. We're-all-Irish-and-Italian-Catholics big. (Well, OK, I am not a Catholic, no thanks to the best efforts of my parents when I was too young to protest, but you know what I mean.) I have a whole lot of cousins I'm not very close to. One of them was named Nancy.

I say "was named" because she died, eighteen months ago, when the police station where she worked as a secretary blew up. Gas leak, apparently. But wait, you say-wasn't Nancy the name of the secretary in _Jus in Bello_? Didn't _she_ die, when Lilith came after Sam and Dean and destroyed the station?

Why yes. Yes it was, and yes she did.

When I got to the part where the secretary's name was Nancy Fitzgerald, I thought, "Wow, what a funny coincidence." When I read the physical description of her and compared it to the women on that side of the family, I did something of a Simple Dog Head Tilt. But then at the end, when the station blew...well, that was just a bit much, and so I did some poking around.

What I found was, frankly, creepy. The people who die, the bit parts, the teaser victims, they don't always get anything more than a first name; it's not always clear, even, what town the boys are heroically saving from evil in this volume. But whenever it was possible to track down names and places...they are _always real_. If you're curious, you can read the list of references after the cut at the bottom, but I'll just hit some high points:

* Stanford senior Jessica Moore died in a fire in her off-campus apartment just before midnight on November 2nd, 2005. She had a live-in boyfriend, who refused to talk to reporters.

* The plane crashes in _Phantom Traveller_ were real, even the dates and times.

* Several young women were killed in Saint Louis by a serial killer who apparently gained access to their homes by impersonating their husbands and boyfriends. A man named Zachary Warren was initially suspected in the death of his fiancee, but was cleared when the real killer was shot by a SWAT team.

* A family in Minnesota was discovered to have been kidnapping and killing people for literally decades. The father and one brother are dead; the second brother's in prison and the youngest child, a girl named Melissa, is in foster care.

* A guy called Andy Gallagher disappeared from Guthrie, Oklahoma in early 2007.

* There was a rash of strange deaths and vicious "pranks" on the campus of Springfield University (Ohio) in the spring of 2007.

* There's a picture from the Biggerson's "Dinner For A Year" contest from a restaurant in New York (state), showing two handsome men-one tall, and one very tall-holding a huge mock gift certificate. (I am not reopening the casting debate, but I have to admit the guy on the right looks more like the description of Dean than my own personal choice, Misha Collins, otherwise known as Avon from the _Blake's 7_ reboot. OK, maybe I am reopening the casting debate.)

* A middle-aged couple called Madge and Edward Carrigan were discovered dead in their home on Christmas Day, 2007, having been stabbed with branches from their own tree.

* Jeremy Frost, a resident of my very own Pittsburgh PA, died in his sleep in early 2008.

* You all know the Ghostfacers website actually exists, right?

But you wanna know the kicker? The one that really makes me wonder what the ever-loving fuck Carver Edlund thinks he's playing at?

Archives for small newspapers aren't always online, even in this day and age, but in the case of Lawrence Kansas I got lucky. Let me quote the relevant sentence:

_John Winchester and his sons Dean, 4, and Sam, 6 months, escaped the blaze, but firemen were unable to rescue Mary Winchester._

Dateline: 3 Nov 1983. I think we know Sam and Dean's last name now.

You may or may not know that I have a Thing about RPF-it really bugs me for some reason. I don't think I look down on people who like it or write it, but it's not something I can do myself. Write all the Sarah/Allison or Nathan/Adam you want; I will be over here. And I've just discovered that my fandom, the fandom that took me away from the Dresden Files and _Firefly_ both, is basically RPF with monsters. And I do not know how to handle that. I'm not sure if I would be quite this upset if it weren't for the personal connection-I didn't spend a lot of time with Nancy or anything, but we did share some small number of genes, you know? I have, as they say, a dog in the fight.

So...that's where I'm at. If you're interested, all the links I could find that seem to relate to the real-world counterparts of things in the books are under the cut. I'm not planning to drop out of fandom-if nothing else, I can always go back to DF and _Firefly_; I've even been known to write for_ Buffy _and various Marvel titles in my day_._ I'm leaving all my SPN fic up for now, and if I decide to take it down I'll give advance notice. But I need to think about things. I haven't bought my ticket to the con yet, and at this point I don't know if I'm going to, no matter how nice it'd be to finally meet some of you in person. And I've got a couple of challenge WIPs, including a Big Bang, that I'm now kind of side-eyeing and argh.

I wish there were some good way to get in touch with Edlund, but I don't think he needs a fangirl demanding to know what he thinks he's doing. And I mean, this is all about ethics and where certain lines get drawn, and my lines aren't the same as anyone else's, necessarily.

Just...read it for yourself, I guess, and tell me what you think. Comments are staying on, but I'm logging IPs and trolling is not going to be tolerated.

**(Let's see how far down this rabbit hole goes)**

_mood: _There's no icon for seriously, seriously messed up, is there?  
_location:_ In the windmills of my mind  
_music:_ Look, I liked mullet rock before the books, OK?


End file.
